Briardene Books

I was looking back over past shortlists for the Arthur C. Clarke Award last weekend, as I have been known to do from time to time, and lighted on the 2001 shortlist, for novels published in 2000; novels, that is, published twenty-five years ago. Here it is:

Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle (Gollancz)

Cosmonaut Keep, Ken MacLeod (Orbit)

Perdido Street Station, China Miéville (Macmillan)

Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler (The Women’s Press)

Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)

Salt, Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

I think the judges for that year can be satisfied with their work. I think the shortlist has aged well. Among other things, it correctly picked out China Miéville, Alastair Reynolds, and Adam Roberts as writers who would go on to have substantial careers. Of the three, it is Roberts who has become a particular touchstone for me. And when I happened to notice that Salt was (according to Wikipedia, at any rate) published exactly twenty-five years ago, as I post this, on 20 June 2000, I was prompted to take my copy off the shelf and re-read some of it.

This is not a “how has it aged” post; for one thing, I haven’t re-read the whole novel. It is more a reflection on the shape of a career. Roberts’ SFADB page shows that after Salt, it was six years before another novel of his, Gradisil, which I read as both appreciation nd critique of twentieth century space-colonisation SF, received an award nomination; since then, many of his books, novels and non-fiction, have been nominated for things, with several wins. I think there are two reasons for this initial drought and subsequent steady recognition. I think it took a few novels for Roberts to fully unlock his voice, and I also think it took a few novels for the SF field at large to learn how to read that voice. I’ve advanced both of these theories before, the first in a review of his ninth novel, Swiftly (2008), an alternate history that takes the events Gulliver’s Travels as real and extrapolates the resulting society:

Focusing on the high-concept-ness of Roberts’s novels has always risked obscuring their other virtues and flaws, but in the last few years there’s been a sense that the high concept is less dominating than it used to be, and that those other virtues and flaws demand more attention. Most obviously, Roberts’s narratives have started to feel a bit more relaxed, a bit more playful. A large chunk of Gradisil (2006), dealing with the actions of an American military officer, is told with a frenetic edge […] in Splinter (2007) the fluidity of language is taken much further […] Swiftly retains some of this energy, some of this feeling of comfortableness, and adds plenty of new strangeness, both entrancing and repulsing.

What this review doesn’t mention is that around this time Roberts was also publishing a series of parodies under thinly-veiled pseudonyms: The McAtrix Derided, The Sellamilion, etc. The next Adam Roberts science fiction novel, Yellow Blue Tibia, an alien invasion novel set in Soviet Russia, was overtly comedic, and attracted wider than usual attention when Kim Stanley Robinson gave a well-timed interview saying that he thought it should win that year’s Booker Prize. I certainly had the impression that this intervention (along with, probably, Roberts’ blogged reviews and criticism) persuaded many readers to take a second look, or a first look, at Roberts’ work. Humour has certainly been a much more prominent part of his novels since then, although it’s rarely jokes just for the sake of jokes. For me the humour in Roberts’ novels is part of a larger tension in work – this next quote is from an essay I had in Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (2016):

One way to close the gap is to consider Roberts’s works as structured by a tension between sincerity and insincerity that can express itself in different ways. In many of his novels, in particular those of the last five years or so, the tension is visible at a micro level, as in Yellow Blue Tibia, with its fussing about language and precision of understanding. It can also be discerned at the macro level: the way that a novel such as Gradisil is structurally insincere. Or the way that many of Roberts’s novels return to certain common themes of human experience – in particular love and war – as though seeking a way to authorize its readers to experience deep emotion, without fully relinquishing their ironic distance. This tension is part of the reason it has taken over a decade for the distribute consciousness of the SF field to feel that it understands ‘the Adam Roberts novel’, because it is uncomfortable: contemporary genre science fiction is predominantly a sincere, even earnest form, both politically and stylistically.

I think I stand by that. I think Roberts is now generally acknowledged (in my view correctly) as a major figure in British SF, but he also remains something of a marmite author, and he has never (unlike, say, Reynolds or Mieville) been consistently published in the US, which has limited his audience. And yet – or perhaps rather than and yet this is actually an explanatory factor given the fantasy-dominated and often genre-mixing nature of the 21st-century field – in many ways, Roberts is one of the most committed science fiction writers currently working. His novels are almost all standalone novels because they are almost all novels that explore a set of ideas to their limits; often ideas from earlier SF (more recently, directly from fantasy); and he doesn’t do fantasy. But he has built a remarkable body of work.

So I picked up Salt, which I probably haven’t re-read since 2001, with this model of Roberts’s career in mind, wondering how much of it I would find in embryonic form.

Salt is a colonization novel, and a planetary romance. It is not uncommon for me to read an Adam Roberts novel knowing that I lack first-hand knowledge of relevant intertexts, but in recent novels that has meant Kant or Hegel; it is much worse to admit that while I can tell you an obvious intertext for Salt is The Dispossessed, in that it involves dueling anarchist and authoritarian societies, I can’t take you any further because I (still, somehow) haven’t read Le Guin’s novel. Nor am I really informed enough to analyse Salt‘s very obvious religious themes, beyond saying that there a biblical references all over the place. What I can do is read it as an Adam Roberts novel.

And in that light: the voice is familiar, but not fully formed. Its duelling first-person narratives do contain turns of phrase, or sentence structures, that feel immediately familiar, but they are also restrained, or perhaps constrained, within the structure that has been chosen for the novel. Tonally, in the voyage out, we are cast straight into a grimy, grim environment, which hardly lightens when the colonists reach their target planet and find it much less hospitable than they had hoped. Coming in the wake of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, it is a much less optimistic vision of what colonisation might entail, certainly not a whole-hearted endorsement of the project of traditional SF. (I also thought of Robinson’s more recent Aurora, as I always do when reading any colonization novel these days.) One thing I have been surprised to find a little lacking, so far: vivid or surprising images. The descriptions of the planet seem a little flat with me, comparing unfavourably to my recollections of, say, Gradisil, which seemed to find uncountable ways of freshly describing the vista of near-earth orbit. I don’t think Salt is badly written, but I do think Roberts’ sentences have become more lively and inventive over the years.

There is also a familiar commitment to a worked-out SF logic throughout.  Note that I say SF logic, not scientific logic. Roberts has occasionally come in for some critique, from hard SF fans, for not doing his sums correctly. The sense I have always gotten, admittedly as someone for whom hard SF is partly about affect, is that Roberts genuinely cares about coming up with something plausible (it is one of the aspects of his novels that does strike me as earnest), but that what he wants is something plausible in support of the overall theme and structure of the novel at hand. He does not start with the rules and extrapolate the story within them, which you might argue is the purest SF approach. Take his two societies’ solutions to the problem of chlorine-poisoned air. The authoritarians surgically alter their people: “we would remove much of their sinuses and fill the space with a carefully grown filter […] derived I think from coral […] and because it functioned as a sinus, the removed chlorine was washed out of the nose again in mucus suspension.” The anarchists, on the other hand, develop a technology with a hint of the playfulness that characterises some later Roberts novels: “You would wear it about your neck at all times, like a pendant, but when its sense-cell detected chlorine, at even the most minute levels, it would leap up. Like a live thing, like a salmon, which is a fish that used to hop out of the waters for joy on Earth.” There is then further detail about how a human actually adjusts to this, to make the slightly ridiculous image more grounded: “it became a sort of reflex. To feel the gentle smack of mask over the lips, and then to take a deep breath through the mouth.” In both cases the text pays attention to how it works; and in both cases “how it works” is subservient to the larger thematic point, namely the nature of the societies that developed such technologies. It is somehow both schematic and detailed at the same time.

It is – so far – a worthwhile re-read. I can see why the Clarke judges would shortlist it. There is a steely core to its approach that helps it to stand out; a human rigour, if not always a scientific one.

And, nothing to do with Roberts per se, there’s a good joke on the cover, too, of a sort. The complete description on the back cover of my hardback edition reads as follows:

SALT is a classic SF novel written by a debut writer.

I mean: can you even imagine a novel being marketed this baldly in 2025? There is, it is true, a slightly more conventional blurb on the inside front flap – “The two communities who went to Salt were united by the dream of a new beginning and, isolated in a landscape of cruel majesty, torn apart by ancient enmities … a novel of remarkable power, intense beauty, and profound insight.” But on the outside of the book, just these few bare words (and a blurb from Peter F Hamilton). Think of what such an approach implies about the expected audience for this book, and the market into which it is published, and (if we assume at least a portion of the audience would accept it as a valid if hyperbolic framing of the content) of how the connotations of “classic” have changed, stylistically, politically. I don’t think Salt is a classic, but I would still like there to be more SF novels like Salt, and more SF writers like Adam Roberts.